1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle wheel aligner and, more particularly, to a communications unit which is attachable to the conventional heads of a wheel aligner and provides for cordless communication of information between the heads and the console of the aligner.
2. Description of Related Art
Vehicle wheel aligners are well known in the art. Such aligners typically comprise four alignment heads which are mountable on the vehicle wheels and include sensors for generating signals representative of the angular orientations of the wheels. The data generated by the sensors is transmitted, in either unprocessed or pre-processed form, to a computer processor means located in a central console. The processor means processes the data according to preprogrammed instructions and displays alignment information for the vehicle on a video display. In addition, the processor means controls the data gathering operation by transmitting appropriate instructions to the heads.
In conventional wheel aligners, data and instructions are communicated between the console and the heads via electrical cables, or cords. However, some newer wheel aligners employ cordless communications means, such as infrared or radio frequency transceivers, to communicate the data and instructions between the heads and the console in accordance with the teachings of U.S. Pat. No. 4,761,749 to Titsworth et al., which is owned by the assignee hereof. Titsworth et al. disclose a wheel aligner comprising heads having integral cordless transceiver means connected to the sensors and a console having integral cordless transceiver means connected to the processor means. While the advantages of eliminating the cords between the console and the heads are many, heads comprising integral cordless transceiver means are significantly more costly to manufacture. This typically makes the cost of a cordless aligner much greater than the cost of a conventional aligner. In addition, a conventional aligner can usually be upgraded to a cordless aligner only by replacing each conventional head with a cordless head, thus often making the upgrade cost-prohibitive.